When Defense Minister Abdel Fattah El-Sisi led a military coup on July 3, 2013, toppling President-elect Mohamed Morsi, riding the Cairo Metro cost the Egyptian one pound, while the weight of the subsidized loaf of bread was 130 grams.

Seven years after the coup and six years after Sisi ruled Egypt, the price of the metro ticket reached 12 pounds, while Sisi’s authority chose a roundabout way to increase the price of the loaf, by reducing its weight to 110 grams and then to 90 grams.

In fact, in the modern history of Egypt, it does not seem that there is a longer journey than the one of draining the pockets of Egyptians over the seven years since the military coup, under the pretext of economic reform and the recovery from poverty and poverty, with repeated promises of a near relief.

Egyptians do not remember one, two, or three promises, but dozens of promises, sound and image, but they are promises that have gone unheeded, to be replaced by a long policy of draining the pockets of Egyptians with donations sometimes and taxes at other times, with rising prices all the time.

In April 2016, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi pledged not to increase prices, no matter how high the dollar, saying, "There will be no escalation in prices for basic commodities no matter what happens to the dollar," but prices exploded after the decision to liberalize the "float" exchange rate.

However, the first promise that Egyptians remembered for Sisi, he made himself, and perhaps millions believed him, is what he said during his candidacy for the presidency in 2014, when he denied the lifting of subsidies on basic goods and services before raising the standard of living, saying with his hands the increase in money, "I must make people rich. First, instead of taking a thousand, there will be a thousand and a half or two thousand. "

Rising prices

But just two months after those statements, and less than a month after Sisi took power, millions of Egyptians were shocked, when they woke up on Saturday morning, July 4, 2014, with fuel prices rising between 78% and 175% at once.

Not a few days passed, and Egyptians did not calm down until the Egyptian government announced that electricity prices for homes rose between 18.2% and 42.1%, and for commercial use between 29% and 46%, starting from August 1, 2014.

After a few months of successive shocks, price hikes following hikes in fuel and electricity prices, huge price booms, and double-digit inflation increased, Sisi returned to playing on promises. In November 2015, he said, "Beware, you can imagine that higher prices are absent from Bali, I am one of you. "

He promised in a speech on Egyptian television that "the state will finish its intervention to reduce prices appropriately," amid long applause from the audience, adding that "this role will be played by the state and the army," and the wave of applause continues, but to no avail on the ground.

Since then, prices have witnessed major jumps, and wages have almost been the same since 2014 in many state institutions and sectors, but Sisi did not stop asking for the deadline after another from year to year, so that Egyptians moved between promises as anxiety moved between the halls of the place warmer than ever.

These repeated promises were noticed by some, and they demanded early on the departure of Sisi, expecting that things would proceed for the worse, amid questions about what the man had presented so far.

Drained pockets

In parallel with the repeated promises, Egyptians were on a date with the beginning of the phase of draining their pockets, which took many forms, such as asking for popular donations that reached women's jewelry, and donating a pound daily through Sisi's famous saying, "pour a pound on Egypt."

Al-Sisi called on charities based on donations from people, institutions and companies, to also donate to the state and not to the poor and needy.

Then he asked to donate decimals in banking, government and shopping transactions, which Sisi expressed by saying, "I want this change."

After requesting donations and change, a different tone appeared among the requests, when Al-Sisi jokingly directed his speech to the Egyptians, "You will pay, I mean, you will pay."

The attrition journey has now arrived with the imposition of a tax on the compulsory 1% of the value of the employee's salary as of the first of July 2020, as well as 0.5% on the grounds of state support in the face of the Corona pandemic.

The impoverishment of the people

In this context, Hossam El-Shazly, a visiting professor of change management and strategic planning at the University of Cambridge, believes that what happened over the past years “is the outcome of the regime’s adoption of the toxic economy’s strategy that has caused the impoverishment of the bulk of the Egyptian people, as an inevitable result of ill-considered economic policies.”

In his speech to Al-Jazeera Net, Al-Shazli explained that what he means by the poisoned economy is the one that the government presents to people on paper, such as data and false information, which gives deceptive indications of the progress and improvement of the economy, while it carries death for the poor and middle classes.

Al-Shazly mortgaged any economic prosperity in Egypt to political and security stability, indicating that the current situation for years has been based on the economy of the ruling class only, which is monopolized by the army and those who work under its cloak, and to transfer debts to future generations, by transferring them to long-term debts instead of short-term ones.

Feudal system

The economic advisor, Ahmed Khuzayem, ruled out that the Egyptian government would change its economic policies despite the negative effects on citizens, because its concept of the economy "is based on the theory of rentier economy, as the feudal system has been for centuries, and ignores the school of added value."

In his speech to Al-Jazeera Net, Khazim stressed that in this system the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and we see a great disparity in classes, warning that the demise of the middle class heralds a great social and economic imbalance, because it is one of the pillars of any real economy in the world.